Understanding how to execute a business process within a company or enterprise in order to maximize revenue, profit, or other metrics, is of enormous importance and has a significant impact on the company's success in the marketplace. Ideally therefore, business processes should be monitored, modeled, and optimized in much the same ways as scientific or manufacturing processes. In particular, it is important to know how various activities within the business process drive various metrics. Thus, it can be understood how to adjust various subprocesses and their drivers in order to achieve appropriate performance relative to one or more overriding goals.
Despite the above described need, it is often difficult to model and describe the activities and metrics that are part of a business process in a way that accurately reflects their relationships to each other and their effects on one another. Very often, the various activities included in a business process are developed independently and no one person has the comprehensive knowledge necessary to accurately determine how one metric affects another. Often, data which attempts to characterize these relationships is centered around separate systems and lacks currency. In other cases, more comprehensive modeling and evaluation can be accomplished, but only with extensive, laborious, calculations performed over an extended period of time.